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Online users can pay with Time instead of Money

techcrunch.com

21 points by crxnamja 16 years ago · 2 comments

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patio11 16 years ago

I usually don't get enthusiastic about any combination of "free", "alternate payment", and "social gaming", but this actually would fill business needs for me. It is a competitor to Amazon Turk, essentially -- giving me access to a tech-savvy time-rich cash-poor audience and having them do repetitive data entry for stupidly low sums of money.

I like this because it is an end-run around micropayments, where marginal costs like transaction costs and approving work munch far too much of the value of the transaction to make it worthwhile. Nobody here needs to ever do a micropayment: users get virtual currency in their game of choice, transaction cost zero. I pay the company with my credit card in increments of probably several hundred bucks, where the transaction cost will be negligible. They pay the game developer in a macro-transaction once a month, transaction cost negligible.

scottieh 16 years ago

It's about time this happened. Totally opens the doors for virtual currency.

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